Donner, His Campaign and his 2A Gun Support
I worked for Donner on his campaign (created his website and managed his communications), as I did for Senator Dick Black and several others this year. His support for 2A is genuine. He has been to the gun range with me (non campaign related, just practice) and his wife Leesa has been shooting with Ed Levine. In fact, for her birthday, Tim and Leesa received a number of older family guns from her brother to add to their collection. Campaign or not, they own guns and support gun rights hands down. His membership in VCDL, NRA etc., were done long before he ever thought of running.
A bit of background... Tim was probably the best suited to beat Allen but he is also a realist, with the Governor on down to the RPV supporting Allen and Allen having millions in the bank, there is no way to beat Allen if Radtke, McCormick and the Bishop were staying in. The only way any of them had a chance is if all but one dropped out and went against Allen head to head. Donner attempted to get all candidates to meet and decide which one of them should become that challenger but the others egos were too large for a realistic approach. If you read the true conservative blogs in Virginia like VA Right and Bearingdrift, they said the same thing. At end, Donner is the only one not brainwashed to think he can win and is the only one with the balls and decency to pull out instead of out begging for scraps and giving false hope to additional donors. As Felix points out, the reality is that none of the candidates have a path forward to do any significant fund raising or at least enough to compete with Allen who has spent 6 years gearing back up for this run.
Outside of that Donner runs a public policy organization that mainly deals with constitutional awareness and support. He is also very heavy in tax reform and 10th Amendment rights. The ad here is simply pre-paid for a number of months. I will, however, suggest to him that he change the graphic to something more supportive of gun rights rather than his former campaign.
While I agree that its difficult to judge a person on just one meeting (for those who heard him at VCDL), when you do your homework on him, Donner was not a joke, is not a pseudo gun fan and frankly, would have been better suited running for President than US Senate--God knows we really don't have anyone solid enough at this point to beat Obama and the front-runner Romney is the idiot who helped spark the idea for Obamacare, is for big government and is anti-gun (Note--make sure we vote Cuccinelli as our Governor because Bolling is literally on Romney's campaign team).